Jessica Milcetich: Putting social media to work for the public

Nominated for: Pioneering the use of social media in the Federal Citizen Information Center, including the use of Scribd, a document-sharing site, to make government publications more widely available.

First IT mentor: My dad. He taught me to use a computer when I was a little girl. I remember sitting in the basement with him playing around on our old DOS machine. I’ve pretty much been playing on computers ever since.

Latest accomplishment on the job: Earlier this year, we launched the USA.gov blog on the Tumblr platform. We were the first federal agency to use the blogging platform. Since then, the blog has experienced rapid growth in readership.

Career highlight: Speaking at my alma mater, the University of Maryland, about the power of social media to spread news.

Your advice for a government IT wannabe: Be open-minded and never say no to a project. You never know when a small project could turn into a bigger opportunity. Put yourself in a place where you can be involved in a lot of different projects.

What you enjoy most about working in government IT: I enjoy helping connect people with the information they need. When people search for answers about government benefits and services, my job is to point them in the right direction using a variety of social media tools.